


Don't Make Me Leave You

by Hazelmist



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: AU after episode 1x12, F/M, Goodbyes, Hurt/Comfort, Two Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-06 03:43:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4206702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hazelmist/pseuds/Hazelmist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She gave up everything just for him. He tries to push her away but she comes back, she always comes back to him even when he doesn’t want her to. “Sherlock, please…” Her voice cracked, and he pulled her toward him and kissed her before she could finish. Spoilers for 1x12 “M”. Joanlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. When She Stayed

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this after watching 1x12 "M" and it ignores anything that happened afterward and contains OCs. Mycroft doesn't exist in this universe and obviously I had no idea that Irene was Moriarty.

She’d threatened to leave him before. 

Once after they’d just met, when they were working one of their first cases together, he’d upset her so much that she told him she’d find him another companion. He told her the truth, dug up her darkest secret and threw it in her face. She wasn’t ready for it and it stung. But she came back. She always came back to him.

He used to try to push her away. He’d tell her he didn’t need her and didn’t want her. He was better off on his own. Even after he’d deduced that she was actually quite helpful and an excellent listener and housekeeper, he still made an effort to prove to her that he could do it without her. But when the time came nearer for her to leave, he found that he couldn’t quite let her go. 

He buried himself in his beekeeping, making a show of counting down the hours, and the minutes, and the seconds until she was gone. But he just couldn’t stop himself from offering her that apprenticeship. When she told him she already had another job lined up, he was surprised at the amount of disappointment he felt. 

When Moran reappeared in his life, bringing with him a storm of memories and emotions he’d long kept buried, he thought he was going to lose it all. But she had prepared him for that moment. She kept him sane and in control. When she came to him, after everything was over, and gently laid her hand on his arm, he confessed. He wanted her to stay. 

So, she stayed. She broke her contracts, risked her job, and lied to him just so that she could see him through that rough patch. She gave up everything just for him. 

It took him exactly two days before he got up the courage to hack into her email and confirm what he’d suspected since the moment she’d looked into his eyes and told him his father agreed to extend her contract. It took her almost three weeks before she tried to tell him the truth. He told her he already knew.

She continued to live with him as his apprentice, valet, housekeeper, bodyguard, sober companion or whatever other name either one of them came up with for the strange relationship they shared. He continued as a consultant for the NYPD and she was always by his side. He came to rely on her more and more as she learned fast and gave him an additional set of eyes that he was sharpening and honing. It never ceased to amaze him how somehow, despite his superior genius, she always managed to be instrumental in the solving of the crime. She was brilliant in her own fashion and constantly surprising him. 

He liked having her around. 

It took his father’s arrival for him to realize that. When his father “exposed” Joan, telling him everything he already knew about the expired contract, Sherlock told him he didn’t care. That’s when his father threatened to kick them both out. He would never forget the look on his father’s face when he offered to buy the property off of him and put it in both his and Joan’s names. In that moment the bond between him and Joan was cemented and she had no idea. 

“You’re making a mistake,” his father warned him. 

Sherlock didn’t make mistakes, or at least not very often. He bought the property and it was in her name as well. When his father died six months later from a heart attack, all of the fortune and wealth he had amassed went to his only son out of familial obligation. Joan made him go to the funeral even though his father had never loved him. But he went for her. After all, if it hadn’t been for his father he wouldn’t have met her. When her hand brushed over his sleeve, he reached out and took it. He held her hand throughout the service and long after they lowered the body into the ground, not because he was grieving, but because he finally was beginning to realize how he couldn’t bear to lose her. 

They had had one close call too many and with Moriarty closing in on them, Sherlock realized that even though he was a genius, he wasn’t bulletproof. After the funeral, it took him only a short amount of time to make his will. He only had to think of one person. 

He never suspected that a more silent and stealthy killer would take him only a few precious years later. He ignored the earliest signs to such an extent that it wasn’t until it was too late that he realized what was happening to him. He spent the rest of his time hiding them from the former surgeon and pulling away from her bit by bit. He wasn’t the only one that had grown attached and co-dependent upon the other. It had happened so gradually that neither one of them had ever noticed, but now he knew it was important for her to leave. He wanted her to walk out of his life in the same manner she had walked into it. He’d rather have her remember him as he was now and in the years earlier, rather than the shell of a person that he was threatening to morph into. For this was a puzzle, a riddle, and a painful but inevitable evil that no man, not even the most brilliant, had ever been able to solve. 

Death stopped for no man. 

In her eyes, it seemed inconceivable that he could be anything but the living, breathing, energetic, genius that was dragging her in and out of danger and from one adventure to the next. When he started to fight her, she fought back. He closed himself off, and she tried, and tried to get through to him. But he knew what he was up against and she had no idea. She never saw it coming, probably because she simply refused to see it. 

He broke her in the end. 

“I can’t do this anymore,” she finally said one night.

They were standing on the roof of the brownstone with the city that never sleeps flung out before them in a myriad of lights. He’d lost track of the results of the experiment he’d been doing the moment he’d felt her step on to the roof behind him. He kept his hands busy and his back to her, but he was giving her his undivided attention because he knew that this was going to be the last time he ever heard that voice. This would be the time he finally drove her away for good. 

“I’m leaving,” she announced. 

He didn’t stop her. 

She’d threatened to leave before, even after they’d reached an understanding, and his father had died, and he’d secretly made out his will, but she’d never actually done it. Not until tonight. This time though, the bags were already packed and most of her stuff had already been transported to a flat that she was going to share with one of her former colleagues who was now in Los Angeles. She told him all of this as the sky lightened and his hands slackened, forgetting the experiment entirely. His heart raced and he trembled, fighting the urge to say something, even if it was only a last farewell. He couldn’t face her, even though he knew she was crying, even though he knew she was angry, and hurt, and would go on hating him, or blaming herself once she found out the truth. He wanted that last glimpse desperately, but he knew that there was a part of him that was still an addict and would never be able to turn away. 

In the end, he did finally turn back with the rising of the sun, but she was already gone. 

A part of him breathed a sigh of relief, but he was still completely miserable without her. He had known it was going to be hard to let her go, but he hadn’t been prepared for this. 

Over the next few lonely months, his condition took a turn for the worse. He grew weak and exhausted easily. He was forced to start taking additional pills and stop his work as a consultant when he was hospitalized. Even his doctor seemed shocked at how rapidly this change had come on and the six months he had supposedly had before Joan left, was decreased to six weeks at most. There was nothing more they or anyone else could do for him, so he was released from the hospital and went home to his empty apartment. 

He hated what was happening to his body and his mind as a result of the drugs he was forced to take just to function. He thought he’d be glad that Joan wasn’t there to see him in this state of deterioration, but he found that he missed her even more. 

One night he wrapped himself in an old blanket and climbed the stairs to her room. Despite his eager talk long ago of using the room for the bees or some other experiment, it was now her room and always would be. He’d left it untouched even though she’d stripped every inch of herself out of the room and taken it with her to Los Angeles. 

Well, almost everything. 

The room still smelled like her. If he laid on the bare mattress and turned his face toward the rough material, he thought that he could still catch the faintest whiff of that scent that had been so her. But perhaps it was the drugs and the disease beginning to take its toll. 

He closed his eyes, desperately breathing the last traces of her in, and fell asleep. He dreamed of her like he had done many, many times since they had started him on the pills, and he dreamed that she came back. She sat on the edge of the bed and spoke to him. He’d just grasped her hand and smiled at her, saying all the things he could never say to her with a glazed gaze. Sleep came for him again, and in his dreams he begged her to stay with him. She soothed him and lay down on the mattress beside him where he could look at her until he fell back to sleep.

When he woke, he was back in his own bed, in his own room. He was alone, with no recollection of how he got back to his room or the dream except for a strong scent of the perfume she used to wear that was probably nothing more than a memory. 

“Watson,” he sighed, closing his eyes again.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” 

He was startled, sitting up so fast that his head spun. He had to rub his eyes, and blink several times before he was sure that he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing and that it wasn’t another one of those annoying side effects of the drugs, which did in fact include the rare hallucination. 

She was standing in the doorway of his bedroom with her arms crossed over her chest. In her hand she clutched one of the many medications he was now forced to endure. In three quick steps, she was hovering over him like an angel of death, rattling the pill bottle in front of his face. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked him again. He could hear the beginning of the dangerous tremor in that question, well before it reached the steady hands that had made her such a good surgeon. She had once played a godlike role with those slender white hands, saving lives until with one wrong move she took one accidentally. And now, after everything she had done, after everything he had done, to put that past behind her, he had led her right back to that ledge. He was a lost cause. She could never save him, but she had still come back to try again. 

“I want the truth!” she demanded, slamming the pill bottle down on the bedside table with enough force to rattle the lamp and the half empty water glass. 

There were a lot of things that Sherlock could’ve said to her, but he only said three. 

“My dear Watson,” he whispered. 

Those three little words carried more weight and spoke volumes more than anything else he could’ve said to her. The slight tremor he’d noticed in her voice, spread to her hands and then to her entire body until she was trembling from head to toe. Before she could stop it, she crumpled in on herself at the foot of his bed. 

In all the years they’d been together, after everything they’d been through, after everything he’d said and done to her, and all the horrors he’d introduced her to, he’d never seen her cry. Not like this. It took him a moment to recover from his shock. But when he did, he found himself retrieving the old blanket from the tangle of sheets and wrapping it around her shoulders. 

She froze the moment his hands touched her. Even with the thick flannel and the thin shirt she was wearing between them, he could still feel her skin trembling and warming beneath his hands. Many times his hands had brushed over her shoulders as he’d helped her into her coat, or pulled out her chair, or hurriedly dragged her from one place to the next, but not like this. No, never like this. 

It felt strange to him to touch someone like this again. Yes, he had sex frequently, but it was purely physical to him. The only exception had been Irene and now even his fondest, most intimate memories of her were tainted with drugs and pain and emotions he couldn’t bear. He hadn’t thought he’d ever be able to feel that way again about anyone and he had been right in a way. Now, he was older, and wiser, and he had seen and done so much more. He had rebuilt his life with Joan Watson’s help and avenged Irene’s death by catching her killer. And he had solved so many crimes with her, and saved so many more lives with her by his side. No, this was different. Joan Watson was different. 

She reached up suddenly, catching one of the hands that lingered on her shoulder before he could remove it. His breath caught in his throat, and he lowered his head until his chin came to rest on her opposite shoulder. He could hear her heavy breathing and inhaled her scent with each breath. She shifted slightly backward and he snaked an arm around her to hold her in place against his chest. He could now not only hear, but feel every breath as it entered and left her body. It felt amazing but it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. He turned his face towards her throat, nuzzling her neck. She tilted her head back, letting her hair spill like black silk between them, and the blanket to fall from her shoulders. 

He kissed her, right where he could best feel her increasing pulse. He opened his mouth and he tasted her skin, sucking that spot as if he could somehow drink the essence of her and share the life and energy that made her heart beat so fast and strong. She moaned, and he felt weak but he knew it had nothing to do with the drugs or his fatal illness. He wanted her. 

His mouth moved lower, sliding over her throat and collarbone. She tugged her shirt down for him, squirming against him as his hands slid up underneath her shirt to help her, stopping in all the right places to caress and elicit shivers and moans from her. 

She tore free of him to pull it up and over her head. His fingers were already at the clasp of her bra, unhooking it. Both the shirt and the bra were tossed aside as she turned around to help him with his disrobing. Between them, they’d just managed to remove his shirt, when their eyes suddenly met. 

She stopped abruptly and he hesitated. But even if he had tried, he couldn’t have stopped himself. She was like a new kind of drug, pulling him in with her dark eyed gaze. His hands reached out to her, framing her fair face between his hands. 

“What is it Watson?” 

“Sherlock, please…” Her voice cracked, and he pulled her toward him and kissed her before she could finish. 

There were no more shared glances or words after that. It was too much. They lost themselves in the purely physical pleasures of sex, fucking each other in the silence. 

When he woke alone again, he seriously wondered if she’d left. Or perhaps the drugs were making him delirious. But there was a fresh cup of tea by his bedside. He recognized it as the ancient remedy her mother had introduced her to that she swore cured everything. He felt better after the first sip and he mused that perhaps it was all true. 

He got out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen where he found her at the table wearing nothing but his shirt. He decided right then and there that if she was a hallucination, he didn’t want it to end. He spent several long minutes just standing in the doorway, thoroughly enjoying the sight of her. He was so enthralled with her beauty that it wasn’t until his eyes moved back to her hands that he noticed what she had on the table before her. 

“Good morning,” he said, clearing his throat. 

She jumped, nearly spilling her coffee over the paperwork spread out in front of her. A slight wince followed, and he saw that instead of getting on the table, the coffee had dribbled down the front of her shirt and onto the floor. Well, it was his shirt actually. 

“Shit,” she swore, putting down the now empty mug on the table at the same time that Sherlock put down his own cup and moved forward to help. After she’d wiped herself off, he took the dishtowel from her and forced her to sit back down. 

“Did you burn yourself?” he asked, kneeling in front of her to mop up the mess. 

“No.” She shook her head, but she still looked distressed as he got to his feet a little unsteadily and dropped the dirty towel into the sink

“Don’t worry about my shirt, I won’t need it for much longer,” he reassured her, but this only seemed to aggravate her more. “Are you sure you’re alright?” he asked again. 

“No!” she burst out. “I am NOT alright!”

Suddenly, she was on her feet and toe to toe with him. 

“How can you just stand there in the kitchen and act like it’s just another typical morning when this,” she picked up his hand, running her thumb over the spot where they’d put the IV in the last time he’d been hospitalized, “Is not okay with me.” Her eyes raked up and down his figure, mapping the visible physical changes he’d undergone since she’d left him. “I’m so mad at you that I would kill you myself if you weren’t already- already – damn it, Sherlock!“ Her breath quickened and her eyes grew shiny.

“You’re cross with me because I didn’t tell you that I was dying,” he deduced. 

“Yes! I never would’ve found out in time if it hadn’t been for your lawyer’s office calling me. You can imagine their shock when I told them I didn’t even know you were sick. I had to ring up almost every hospital in the country and I had to call in a lot of favors before I was able to get a hold of someone that would give me some answers about your condition. You should’ve told me when you were diagnosed months ago. That’s what a normal human being would’ve done!” 

“I’m not normal,” he corrected her.

“No, you’re not,” she sighed, running a hand through her hair and pacing away from him. “I suppose that’s why this is even harder for me to understand.” 

She sat back down at the table, dropping her head into her hands. He thought that maybe it would be best for him to tune her out now or maybe even disappear while she had herself another long cry, but when he heard the first sob, something twisted inside of him again and he caved. Crossing the room, he stopped beside her and rested a hand on her shoulder. 

“Hush, none of that now,” he whispered soothingly, bringing his other hand up to stroke her hair. She lifted her head and sniffed, looking at him through teary eyes. 

“You’re dying, Sherlock,” she said, bluntly. He had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. 

“Bravo, Watson, your deductive reasoning skills are improving,” he quipped. 

“I’m not okay with that,” she told him, angrily lashing out and hitting his chest. Even in his weaker state, Sherlock easily restrained her. 

“Which part?” he asked between clenched teeth as he held her back. 

“You, dying,” she panted. 

“I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it either,” he told her, pushing her back down into the chair. “You may find it hard to believe but I actually do enjoy breathing,” he informed her sarcastically, caging her in. “I liked my work and my life, and _sometimes_ , when you’re not assaulting me, I even enjoy our time together, Watson.” 

“Then why’d you push me away?” she spat. “Why would you close yourself off and force me to leave you when you knew that you only had a few months left to live? Why would you do something like that when I’m the only friend you’ve got!”

Her hand shot out, slithering underneath his arm for the evidence, but his hand slammed down on top of hers with a bang. He could hear the sound of paper crumpling beneath their palms, and even though he knew it was what she’d been studying so intently earlier, he couldn’t bear for her to bring it out again. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked the same question that she’d been asking since she walked back into his life with just as much pain as when she’d walked out of it. 

“I couldn’t,” he said, staring hard at the spot where he still held her hand pinned to the tabletop. “I couldn’t tell you. It would’ve changed things between us. And then I didn’t want you to see me like that, like _this_ , a shell of who I used to be. I’m dying and there’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do to stop it. In a few weeks I’ll be gone.” He lifted his eyes slowly from their joined hands and turned to look at her. 

“In my will, I’m leaving you everything I have Watson, but it’s not enough, is it?” 

“Sherlock…” she whispered, but she could manage nothing else. 

He released her hand so that he could take her face between his hands. He smoothed back her hair from her forehead and gently brushed away the tears. 

“I thought that it would be best for both of us if you left,” he confessed, looking her in the eye. “But I don’t want to leave you either.”

“I won’t leave. I’m staying right here,” she promised, winding her arms around him. 

“I know.” 

He captured her mouth with his and they sealed the pact with a kiss. Soon though, he tasted the salt of her tears on his tongue and felt her shaking. Or perhaps he was the one that was crying and trembling, with everything that was changing so rapidly, he could no longer be sure. They wound up on the sofa, holding onto each other for dear life. He showered her with kisses, whispering over and over again those three little words. 

“My dear Watson, my _dear_ Watson…”

And she wept and told him that she loved him too. 

They had three more months together, but he had to leave her in the end. 

She’d threatened to leave him before but she never did. He always thought that she would be the one to leave, but even in those few months when he’d desperately driven her out of his life and halfway across the country, she never really left. Not really. She came back. She always came back to him. And when he died, on a cold November morning, she was holding his hand and the last thing he saw. 

He took a piece of her with her as his eyes closed on her for the last time, but when he left, he knew he was leaving her, having given her everything he had.


	2. When She Left

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote Don’t Make Me Leave You after “M” and then proceeded to try and edit it. Instead I went back to the beginning and ended up writing this. I couldn’t decide what version I liked better and they kind of developed into two mirror images that evolve into opposite outcomes. So the beginning starts out similar and then it kind of branches off into its own little story. This was written after 1x12 so Mycroft doesn't exist, Lestrade hadn't been introduced, and obviously I didn't know that Irene was Moriarty.

He never thought that this would happen. He goes through it over and over again, wondering at what point he could have let her go. Because no matter how painful it would have been, he thinks that any ending would’ve been better than this one. 

*

She’d threatened to leave him before. 

Once after they first met, he told her that he lied to spare her feelings. And then he told her the ugly truth about the patient that she couldn’t save. He only stated a fact he had deduced just by observing her, but she wasn’t prepared and it almost shattered her. In that moment, she nearly gave up on him and on herself. Even then, the look on her face and her departure had upset him more than he would have liked to admit. But she came back and he was surprisingly pleased. 

She pushed him to be a better man, but he didn’t always agree with her methods and sabotaged every attempt. He tried to make her go away with the proposal of a vacation, and continuously referred to her as his personal valet or housekeeper. He sat through the recovering addicts meetings she dragged him to, but he hypnotized himself. He agreed to all kinds of silly things like jogging, but only because he wasn’t listening and in the morning he wouldn’t remember anything she said. She forced him to pick a sponsor and he specifically chose the one he thought she’d dislike the most. He hired an actor to humiliate her when she was supposed to have dinner with his father, hacked into her email and phone, and crashed dates and family dinners. This went on for weeks, and when the contract’s time drew to a close, Sherlock was still drug-free and Joan was still there. He told her he’d done those things because he didn’t need her, but she disagreed and told him that it was all because he didn’t want her to leave. He laughed at her, but that didn’t stop him from trying a short time later to bribe her to stay. 

Moran’s reappearance in New York changed everything. The killer brought not just death for one innocent man but a storm of bitter memories and a thirst for revenge that threatened to destroy Sherlock. Getting past her after she discovered his dark plans for “M” was one of the hardest things he ever had to do. She had prepared him though, and when “M” walked away with nothing more than a painful but ultimately harmless injury Sherlock still had his sanity, his freedom, and the name of Irene’s real killer thanks to her. He had thought she would’ve left him then, after he finally admitted that he would actually miss her after she was gone, but when he woke the following morning she was still there with a promise to stay.

She never left. 

He didn’t need to hack into her email to know that his father had never agreed to extend her services. He knew she’d lied but he didn’t know why. The days turned into weeks and the weeks into months and still she stayed. She shadowed him, and he trained her, taking her with him everywhere as he honed those deductive reasoning skills that showed so much promise. But he quickly learned that there was much that she could teach him as well. She seemed to be instrumental in solving every case, always piecing something together or forcing him to look at something from a different angle. She was brilliant and constantly surprising him with what she could do. Gradually, he grew to rely on her as more than just a student, a listener and someone who kept him company and picked up after him. But it wasn’t until his father “exposed” Joan and tried to force her to leave that Sherlock realized the extent to which she’d become a permanent fixture in his life. 

That was the first time he ever told his father _sober_ to piss off. It felt wonderful, but Sherlock took it a step further by telling him that he intended to shack up with the “help” as his father condescendingly called her for many more years. He would never forget the look on his father’s face. Nothing, he could’ve said could’ve angered him more. 

The glorious victory was short-lived though, when Joan Watson managed to drag him out of the restaurant after their very public and embarrassing row. 

She’d threatened again to leave him now that she’d been officially exposed as a liar. He almost rolled his eyes for the assumption that he’d be stupid enough not to have surmised it himself after all these additional months. 

“Don’t be silly, Watson, you have to stay. I just told my father that I intend to shack up with the housekeeper for as long as I please and it wouldn’t do us any good if you were to go and leave me now and give him exactly what he wants. The kitchen’s a mess, by the way, and I wonder if now that we’re officially “shacking up” if we should consider a shag or two now and then…” 

She slapped him so hard that he saw stars. She told him she had half a mind to pack her bags right then and there. He tried to make her see that his offer was a considerable compliment, coming from him, but when he woke up on the floor the next morning with a “considerable” lump on the back of his head, he realized that it was going to take a little bit more than that to get an incredible woman like Joan Watson to stay. 

It took him a fortnight and a trip more than halfway across the country, but when she finally agreed to hear him out he told her what she needed to hear. Six words were more than sufficient.

“I miss you. Please, come home.” 

“You didn’t have to come,” she told him when it was all said and done and she realized that he’d flown there and he was offering to fly them both back, despite his fears. 

“Yes, I did.”

He held out his hand and she passed him the suitcase. Their hands brushed and she held on, refusing to relinquish her grip on him or the suitcase. Her hand was warm, but the heat of her gaze was searing. 

“Don’t make me leave you again, because next time I leave you, I won’t come back,” she warned him. 

He swallowed and nodded, realizing that letting her leave him again wasn’t an option. The fortnight without her had been so agonizing that he didn’t even have the heart to tell her that his fear of flying had been surpassed and demolished by the fear of losing her. 

He shocked them both when he dropped her suitcase and pulled her toward him instead. 

Now, he would make sure that she stayed. 

There were some things though that were out of his power. His personality, his work, and his superior intelligence had a way of getting under anyone’s skin and Joan was no exception. She threatened to leave him many more times, just because he was driving her mad. But even those forces could never quite sway her. She enjoyed the job and his company just as much as he did hers. Something greater than himself came between them to make her leave. 

And on one cold November morning, something did come between them. 

Sherlock gazed out on what had once been his beloved city for the last time. His hands were moving on their own accord, following the instructions on autopilot as his brain cycled through a dizzying plethora of options searching for anything that might save him from this fate. But his mind kept circling back to one thing: Watson. There were hundreds of times when he had texted her, called her, begged her, bribed her, and once when he flew halfway across the country just to get her back by his side. But as he turned his back on the city and faced his enemy, he wished that for once in her life she would stay away from him. 

But Joan Watson was a force to be reckoned with, and she rarely ceased to amaze him. 

No sooner had Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes, for what should have been the last time, when he heard the sound of her voice. Sherlock had only a moment to open his eyes and recognize the woman racing toward them, before Moriarty refocused his attention. Too late, Sherlock realized. He kicked out at Moriarty, knocking him off his feet. It gave Watson enough time to come in close enough to aim the gun she’d somehow acquired, and Sherlock to begin the painful process of freeing his tied bloodied hands. But Watson was more concerned with Sherlock than Moriarty. 

“Sherlock! You’re bleeding!” 

He saw what was going to happen, before it unfolded and all he could do was cry out helplessly as it all unraveled before him. 

“Watson, move!” 

Moriarty shot her, a split second before Sherlock seized her gun and managed to end the life of the world’s greatest criminal mastermind. The game was finished and he had won, but at what cost?

As he took her in his arms, he realized that he was the loser. First Moriarty had taken Irene, and now he was going to take his dear Watson from him as well. 

“Your hands, they’ll have to amputate the left one if you don’t wrap it,” Watson informed him drowsily as she threatened to sink into a sleep he knew he couldn’t wake her from. He had the insane urge to laugh. 

Instead he hushed her, but she sighed, “I love your hands. You know that, right?” Something unpleasant churned in his stomach as he harshly told her to stop talking and save her strength.

“I don’t know why I love you, but I do. I always have,” she whispered, coughing up an amount of blood that frightened him. Her grip on his hands slackened as her eyes slid shut, her whole body relaxing in his arms. He had dreamt of this so many times before, but not like this, no, never like this. He called her name, but she didn’t respond. He staggered beneath the weight of it all, and a blinding sense of panic and fear seized him. 

“Please, don’t leave me,” he begged her. Her eyelids fluttered, and he pressed his lips to hers in a foolish, desperate kiss. “My dear Watson,” he murmured, cradling her head, “I don’t want you to go.”

“I know.”

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. And it was only then that he realized how much he loved her. But it was too late. 

She’d threatened to leave him many times before, but when she finally did leave him it wasn’t at all in the manner that he’d expected, even though she’d warned him once before.

She left the hospital two days later in a box. 

They found him in the morgue with his head in his hands. 

“My dear Watson,” he wept. “I’m so sorry.”

*

He never thought she’d be the one to leave him, but in the end she leaves him, just like everyone else. As he stands in front of her grave, in his mind he can see every single time she threatened to leave him and every single time he should have let her go. He selfishly clung to her because she loved him right from the start. And now he knows that he loved her too, but he hadn’t realized it until the end. Perhaps if he had known it earlier, he would have loved her enough to let her go…

But would she really have left him?

He thinks of every single time she saved his life, and the last image of her racing toward him, bold, brave and fearless, burns into his brain like a brand that he’ll never be able to not see when he closes his eyes. No, she never would have left him, even if he had had the strength to push her away. 

He bends down and adds an orchid to the grave. 

Then he turns her back on her for the last time and walks away. He leaves New York City behind just like he left London. But while Irene’s death had destroyed him, Watson’s death restores him in a way that surprises him. Moriarty may be dead, but there are still many more strands of his web that need to be followed and this time, with everything he learned from Watson, he’ll be able to keep going. 

At the gates to the cemetery, a sharply dressed woman waits for him, sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked, unmarked black SUV. 

Sherlock walks right up to the car, and leans in through the window, startling the woman even though it was rather obvious she’d been watching him.

“Agent Lestrade, I presume?” he inquires, even though he recognizes her from the news.

“Sherlock Holmes,” she answers.

She folds up the newspaper she’d been pretending to read and he slides into the passenger seat as she unlocks the door for him.

“I heard about your partner, Joan Watson,” she says hesitantly as she turns the key in the ignition. “I could tell you how sorry I am, but it’s never enough.” 

Sherlock sucks in a breath and nods. Joan Watson had been so much more than his partner and even the mention of her name physically hurts him. 

“My partner got shot seven months ago and she died saving my life too.” Her dark eyes burn in her sallow face as she turns toward him and Sherlock wonders if perhaps she truly does know what he’s going through. Perhaps they have a lot more in common than he had hoped. 

“Let’s make sure the bastards pay for what they did to them and all those other poor souls, yeah?” 

“I intend to,” Sherlock vows. 

She pulls out of the cemetery, heading for the airport. And even though he told himself he wouldn’t look back, Sherlock watches in the mirror until the cemetery his dear Watson is buried in, fades from view.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, that was a bit depressing. My next Elementary fic will be happier, I swear! Once again Irene's identity hadn't been revealed and Mycroft and Lestrade hadn't been introduced, so I put my own spin on them, making Mycroft Sherlock's father and gender swapping Lestrade. Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this right after watching the “M” episode but when I went back to edit it I was unsatisfied and never posted it. Instead I wrote another alternative story, which I will post as a second chapter and a sort of parallel to this one.


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